* How does a palace 'disappear' underground?
* Seven levels of Troy? Wasn't it a bit bumpy for building on by layer seven?**
* Would the contemporary world be a happier place if we practiced bull-jumping, washed each other's feet as a gesture of love and raised our arms above our heads to honour the dreamy-faced, poppy-crowned mother goddess?
Knossos, palace of the legendary King Minos, his filthy wife Pasiphae, and her son, the half-human, bull-headed Minotaur. Twenty-five minutes from Heraklion by local bus #2, six euro entry fee, open 8:30-19:30 summer, 8:30-15:30 winter.
For centuries Knossos dipped out of the known world, persisting only as myth: a twisting, partitioned, terraced palace a labyrinth; bull-worship remembered as a Queen passionately, lasciviously in love with a beautiful animal; the King whose apartment windows overlooked the sacred horns become the cuckold, reluctant guardian of a monster.
Enter Arthur Evans. Arthur Evans, good solid British stock, excavator and hypothesisor. The palace had been 'rediscovered' by Minos Kalokairinos in 1878, but serious excavation was forbidden until England took over the administration of Crete. In 1900 Evans arrived with a team of students, and set to. Bearing the supreme confidence of a late Victorian, he didn't just dig and uncover, he hypothesised and reconstructed, labeled and assigned, touched up, remodeled, conjectured.
The explanatory signs at Knossos have a faintly resigned tone: Evans called this the theatre 'because it reminded him of other theatres'. 'Evans believed that this room was used for bathing, although other similar rooms show no sign of water-related activity'. 'This area is entirely reconstructed and may not represent the original design...'
Knossos as we saw it today is not only the twisting remains of Minoan power; it is also a portrait of the inside of an English gentleman's head.
* Posted later because of lack of connectivity.
**This question looks forward to a later part of our trip.
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